Strongly correlated states of a small cold atomic cloud from geometric gauge fields

TL;DR

This paper investigates the emergence of strongly correlated quantum states in a small cold atomic cloud under an artificial magnetic field generated by laser-induced gauge potentials, using exact diagonalization to analyze beyond-adiabatic effects.

Contribution

It introduces a method to analyze strongly correlated states in small cold atom systems with laser-induced gauge fields, going beyond the adiabatic approximation.

Findings

Identification of generalized Laughlin wave functions in the system.

Analysis of non-adiabatic effects on correlated states.

Characterization of gauge field effects on atomic correlations.

Abstract

Using exact diagonalization for a small system of cold bosonic atoms, we analyze the emergence of strongly correlated states in the presence of an artificial magnetic field. This gauge field is generated by a laser beam that couples two internal atomic states, and it is related to Berry's geometrical phase that emerges when an atom follows adiabatically one of the two eigenstates of the atom--laser coupling. Our approach allows us to go beyond the adiabatic approximation, and to characterize the generalized Laughlin wave functions that appear in the strong magnetic field limit.